The effects of socioeconomic status, work-life balance and mental health on happiness among Thai workforces

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between happiness and mental health (MH), socioeconomic status (SES), work-life balance (WL), family satisfaction (FS) and community satisfaction (CS). The variables of happiness are consisted of three components: life satisfaction, positive affect and negative affect. There are two elements for mental health: mental capacity (coping ability) and mental quality (kindness and altruism) while socioeconomic status variable is a composite indicator of education and income. We used the secondary data from the National Statistics Office of Thailand. The samples are composed of 8,585 voluntary respondents aged 15 years and over. The data were analyzed using structural equation modelling (SEM) with AMOS version 23.0 in order to test the relationships of factors affecting happiness.

The findings revealed that happiness was significantly correlated with SES, MH, FS, WL and CS. The correlations between happiness and SES, MH, FS, WL and CS were .32, .31, .22, .14 and .08, respectively. The total effect of SES, MH, FS, WL and CS toward happiness were .35, .306, .316, .165 and .216, respectively. The results suggested that SES, MH and FS were highly correlated with Thai workforce’s happiness while WL and CS had rather low correlation with happiness. Mental health which comprising of coping ability, kindness and altruism played an important role as a partial mediator between happiness and all affecting factors. There was a high statistically significant relationship between FS and CS which the covariance between FS and CS was 0.34. Moreover, the developed SEM model of happiness was proved to be able to predict happiness at an acceptable level of 40% (R2 = 0.4).